Part 19 (1/2)

'And is it just Parker in whom you're interested,' said Louis, 'or are there others?'

'Others like him?'

'There are no others like him,' said Louis. 'You don't need me to tell you that.'

'No, there are no others like him, or not.'

'And you watch him to what end?'

'You know, you can talk real nice when you choose. I'd heard you were, like, monosyllabic.'

'I tell him that all the time,' said Angel. 'The problem is, I can't figure out which way of speaking is really him.'

'I guess he's just all hidden depths,' said Walsh.

'I guess he is at that. By the way, you didn't answer his question: why watch Parker?'

Angel had a lazy smile on his face, and Walsh thought that it would be very easy to underestimate him.

'I'm afraid that's above my pay grade.'

'Because you just work here, right?'

'Right.' Walsh finished his beer and waved at the waitress for another. 'I hear that you had a conversation with Ross not too different from this one, back when Parker was shot. He told you then what he thought it was all about.'

'People who believe in buried G.o.ds,' said Louis. 'Do you believe in buried G.o.ds, Detective Walsh?'

'I'm Episcopalian. I believe in everything.'

Walsh's second beer arrived, along with the appetizers, which were huge. Walsh tried to blot out his wife's disapproving face so that he could enjoy his food. He bit into a mouthful of sausage and continued talking through the meat.

'I suppose I accept what Ross does: there are individuals whose own belief systems cause harm to others, and they have to be stopped. That's as true of radical Muslim clerics who preach that it's okay to behead apostates as it is of the boards of selectmen of small Maine towns who aren't above killing to protect their privileged position.'

If he was expecting a reaction from Angel and Louis, he was destined to go unrewarded.

'I know you tried to burn the town of Prosperous to the ground,' Walsh added, just for clarification.

Louis dipped a piece of crab cake into habanero mayo. Angel tried some of Walsh's smoked sausage. Walsh had the sense that they were slightly disappointed in him for being so obvious. Walsh didn't give a d.a.m.n. He objected to men especially from New York, although Ma.s.sachusetts would have been almost as bad coming into his state and setting fire to towns. It was unmannerly, and caused unrest.

'Anyway,' he went on, 'it seems like Parker exerts a kind of gravitational pull on some of these individuals, which brings us closer to them. And Ross believes that an endgame may be in sight, and Parker has a role maybe a significant one to play in that too.'

'And do a lot of folk share your a.n.a.lysis of the situation?' said Louis.

'We tend not to broadcast it too widely,' said Walsh. 'Makes us sound flaky.'

'So Ross suggests that you should let us take a look at the body in the morgue-' Angel began, but Walsh interrupted.

'Because we were clearly looking at the body of a professional killer,' Walsh finished for him.

'And how did you figure that?'

'Our pretty friend turned up on a piece of security footage in Florida not so long ago. A place called the Hurricane Hatch down near Jacksonville got ripped off, and the bartender, a guy name of Lenny Tedesco, was killed, or that was what it looked like until Tedesco's wife was found dying in her bed. She went hard. Whoever killed her and we're a.s.suming it was Steiger took the trouble to remove her teeth before leaving her for dead. Curiously, the Florida cops think that it was probably him who called the ambulance, although he must have known that she wouldn't survive another hour.

'The bar had surveillance cameras hooked up to a hard drive, but Tedesco's killer was smart enough to take it with him when he left. Now, the owner of the Hurricane Hatch is a guy named Skettle. Tedesco had a piece of the bar just ten per cent but Skettle was of the opinion that he was upping that to fifteen, maybe twenty, by skimming. To prove it, he'd installed a second pinhole camera behind a mirror over the register. It didn't take in much of the rest of the bar, just the register, but when the footage was examined it came up with a good shot of Earl Steiger in profile and that's a very distinctive profile cleaning out the night's takings.

'So now we have Steiger killing a bartender and his wife near Jacksonville maybe for kicks, or maybe because he really needed the whole four hundred and change in the register, or a combination of both then coming all the way up here to cut Ruth Winter's throat, except he doesn't rape or mutilate her, and he leaves her daughter alive. Again, that could have been an accident he might have thought that he'd applied enough pressure to kill the child, and been mistaken but I don't buy it. I think he knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way.'

'Okay,' said Louis. 'So even before I took a look at his body, you made him for a pro. But are you a.s.suming a connection between what happened in Florida and what took place up at Green Heron Bay? Could be two separate jobs.'

'We considered that too, but you're forgetting something: Boreas has supplied us with three bodies in total. We have Ruth Winter, and Steiger, but we also have Bruno Perlman, who washed up at Mason Point with a mark on his eye socket that may or may not have been caused by a blade. Bruno Perlman happened to be a native of Duval County, Florida, with an address in Arlington, which is about a thirty-minute ride from the Hurricane Hatch. We think that there's a good chance Perlman might have known Lenny Tedesco, at least casually.'

'Why?'

'He had a Hurricane Hatch T-s.h.i.+rt in his closet. And then there's the fact that Perlman, Tedesco, and Ruth Winter were all Jewish. Finally, and here's the clincher, last month Bruno Perlman visited Ruth and Isha Winter at their home in Pirna.'

'Wait,' said Angel. 'How come you're only finding that out now? You'd think Ruth Winter might have mentioned that fact when Perlman's body appeared a couple of beaches away from her house. Maybe her mother might have brought it up too.'

'Isha Winter doesn't read newspapers and doesn't own a TV,' said Walsh. 'She's also older than Mount Katahdin. As for Ruth Winter, she's not around to ask anymore.'

'Doesn't fit, them both staying quiet,' said Louis.

'No,' said Walsh, 'it doesn't. The mother I can buy, but not the daughter.'

'And,' said Angel, 'Ruth never called her mother and said, ”Hey, remember that guy who came to visit a while back? Well, you'll never guess where he is now ...”'

'Isha Winter says she didn't. We spoke to some of Ruth's friends down in Pirna, too. She didn't have many she was pretty solitary and they say she didn't discuss Perlman with them at all, either before or after his body was found.'

'So why would she keep quiet about it?'

'Either she was afraid or she was involved,' said Louis.

'Or both,' said Walsh.

'Why was Perlman visiting the Winters' in the first place?' asked Angel.

'Because Isha Gorski, later Isha Winter, was the sole survivor of a small n.a.z.i concentration camp called Lubsko, and Perlman lost relatives there. Apparently he wanted to talk with her about her memories of the place. Isha says that her daughter arrived while she was speaking with Perlman, but the visit didn't last for long. She doesn't like recalling what happened to her during the war, and I can't blame her for that. I'd never even heard of Lubsko until this week.'

Walsh shared what little he knew of the camp with Angel and Louis, but it was enough.

'Parker says he and Cory Bloom got the story of Lubsko from Epstein when he came to Boreas, but at that time n.o.body knew that Isha Winter was once Isha Gorski.'

'So now you have a link between Florida and Maine,' said Louis. 'You also have a cl.u.s.ter of Jewish victims, which could make it a hate crime.'

'And brings in the FBI,' said Angel.

'Hence Ross.'

'Well, Ross would have been involved just because of Parker, but, yeah, the feds have expressed an interest,' said Walsh. 'We also have the Justice Department pulling up a chair because of Engel, the war criminal. He was on the staff at Lubsko, and two Lubsko hits in the same state has set lights flas.h.i.+ng at the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section.'

'And you already had enough to be getting along with,' said Angel. 'Like not finding this Oran Wilde kid.'